June 14, 2019 – IBA announced the physics team of University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) in the Netherlands has developed and clinically implemented a novel automated treatment log-based patient quality assurance (QA) approach for proton therapy. This enables them to reduce the time needed for the in-beam measurement-based conventional patient QA.
With this new approach, the center is now able to streamline and reduce the QA time per patient, extract more clinically relevant information from the QA data and establish continuous quality control of the treatment throughout the course. Furthermore, this will allow them to reduce the time to continue treatment course with adapted plans, when needed, and make a step towards supporting online adaptive workflows.
This new automated patient QA approach combines several open source projects: CAPTAIN, an automatic workflow manager using web-technology; a DICOM picture archiving and communication system (PACS) database (Orthanc) providing an interface with the treatment planning system (TPS); computation routines from open-REGGUI and others, developed at UMCG; and a Monte Carlo proton dose engine (MCsquare).
CAPTAIN, open-REGGUI and MCsquare are open-source research tools supported by the openPath initiative, which is aimed at researchers, medical physicists and clinicians to accelerate research. It is the first time that a center has applied the extensive internal QA validation of UMCG to use the open source software platform in the clinic.
Prof. Stefan Both, head of physics at UMCG, commented, “Thanks to the support of IBA and the OpenPath platform, we managed to develop and implement an automated patient QA process that will allow us to considerably reduce the time to perform patient QA operations from about 45 minutes to 5 minutes. This means we have today the capacity to treat [an] additional 1 to 2 fractions per day, shorten [by] two days the time from simulation to treatment delivery and explore adaptive proton therapy protocols to maximize the clinical potential of the proton treatment beam.”
For more information: www.iba-worldwide.com
September 29, 2026 
